Vaping by US high schoolers has increased by 900 per cent

“E-cigarettes went from being rare in 2010 to being the most common tobacco product used by our nation’s youth,” said surgeon general Vivek Murthy on Thursday. Among American high schoolers, vaping reportedly increased by 900 percent between 2011 and 2015, and Murthy says this sharp uptick in e-cigarette use places a new generation at risk of addiction to nicotine, and tobacco-related disease.

E-cigarettes do not contain tobacco, instead combining nicotine, flavourings and other chemicals and heating them to create a vapour. But exposure to nicotine can have adverse effects on developing adolescent brains, including deficits in attention and learning, mood disorders, and reduced impulse control, Murthy said at a press conference coinciding with the release of the report.

Advertisement

Sixteen percent of high school students have reported using e-cigarettes in the last month and almost 40 percent have tried them at some point, Benard Dryer, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, told the same press conference. “That’s a staggering figure,” he said.

Though conventional cigarette smoking has declined dramatically over recent decades in the US, the report stresses that e-cigarette use is associated with the use of other tobacco products and that perceptions of e-cigarettes as less harmful than traditional cigarettes can lead to increased rates of vaping.

Gateway drug?

Tyra Nicolay, a 16-year-old from New Mexico also spoke at the briefing, saying that she started using e-cigarettes in her first year of high school because she liked the flavour. “I didn’t know they contained nicotine. I thought it was only water vapour,” she said.

But the report drew criticism from researchers in the UK, including from Peter Hajek, director of the Tobacco Dependence Research Unit at Queen Mary University of London. “The new US report’s conclusions do not tally with what the actual data show,” he told the Science Media Centre, in London. “It is simply not true that e-cigarettes are a tobacco product or that vaping lures children to smoking or that it creates dependence in non-smokers.”

“On-going vigilance is needed, but so far, e-cigarettes have acted as a gateway away from smoking, for adults and adolescents alike,” Hajek said.

According to Murthy, the jury is still out on whether e-cigarettes can be effective in helping people quit smoking. “The important question of whether or not e-cigarettes can help adults quit smoking has yet to be answered with high quality scientific data,” he said.